Essay

The puritans who settled New England in 1630 were not coming to America to promote religious freedom for all, but to achieve for themselves a freedom from the church and civil officials in England who had prevented them from pursuing their faith as they believed God wanted them to. The settlement of Massachusetts presented the colonists with their first opportunity to decide what views and actions were acceptable and to prohibit what was not.

Essay

Imagine saying goodbye to family, friends, and familiar places to take a dangerous voyage across thousands of miles of ocean in a small wooden ship. Your destination: a strange and often hostile land. Yet, in the 1600s, thousands of Dutch, English, French, and Spanish men and women did just that because of poverty, religious persecution, or a hope that a better life lay across the Atlantic Ocean.

Glossary Term – Event

Glossary Term – Event

The Molasses Act, which levied a stiff tax on rum, molasses, and sugar produced in the British West Indies for sale in the colonies, produced vigorous opposition on the grounds that it sought to protect English economic interests at the colonists’ expense.